Of
course if they keep coming at me
with their fists, then I may yet
turn against
them.

October19,
2007 (Friday)Windsor
(England)

SUN streaming across the lawns when I get up.
A beautiful, but chilly, day.

I
get a call from Oxford about their forthcoming
event. Lord Janner has phoned them,
pleading with them not to invite me, shrieking
that they are all anti-Semites, and horrified
that Oxford would even contemplate it. Janner
had said they were causing a major crisis in the
University, and even called them
"anti-Semitic."

Of course if they keep coming at me with
their fists, then I may yet turn against
them.

B. tells me her newsagent has again set aside a
copy of today's Jewish Chronicle for her.
It is not her regular reading, which normally
barely reaches from Hello! to the
Mail -- but I am all over it again. What
is it with these people?

As I told Bernie Josephs at the
JC (or was it the news editor of
Cherwell?), I cannot legally stop a
journalist saying that a High Court judge
referred to me as a Holocaust denier nearly
eight years ago. One day perhaps we will find
out why Mr Justice Gray ruled the way he
did. As Mrs Merton said to the pretty
young bride of the balding, ageing conjurer
Daniels, "What was it about this multi
millionaire that made you fall in love with
him?"

If however a journalist writes now that I am
an active HD, that is a new kettle of
gefilte. Again I still cannot stop him
writing it -- we live in a country of free
speech, this is not Germany or Austria -- but he
must face the consequences, and as I said to
New York Times writer Don
Guttenplan in 1999, the year before the
Lipstadt-Fest, when he asked the question: Why
her? She was, I said, just the one unfortunate
enough to be picked out of the line to be
shot.

Well, shot she was not, but she and her pals
got quite a pasting: they limped out of Court
having poured thirteen million dollars of their
Hollywood money into of King Pyrrhus of
Epirus seem overwhelming by comparison; but that
smear-marmalade is spreading pretty thin now,
and they'll have to think up something else.

B. puts me on taxi duty -- Jessica's half term
has begun, she is to be picked up from a party
in Kew at ten p.m. and I must ferry her home to
Sloane Street, where half our family is still
hunkering down. My half is housed at Windsor, an
equal distance in the opposite direction down
the M-4. It will be a sixty-mile round trip, and
. . . oh, well. That's what fathers
are for, and I've been doing it now for forty or
fifty years: acting as taxi.

Waiting for that late hour, I settle down on
the sofa in the drawing room overlooking the
rose garden, and read Bernie Joseph's latest.
How can I get out from under their skin?

At the end of one article, he writes:

Auschwitz
survivor Trude Levi recalled encountering
Irving when she worked in London-based
Holocaust resource the Wiener Library in the
early 1960s. "He was coming in to do
research," she recalled. "He was
good-looking, very well spoken and very
polite, but for some reason we all had an
uncanny feeling about him. Then, when his
book came out about Dresden, we realised he
was in love with Hitler."

That is nice: here is what I drafted last
year in prison in my memoirs about the Wiener
Library:

The
Library proved an immensely helpful resource,
despite itself. Its then director C. C.
Aronsfeld had all the looks but little of
the good nature of Sergeant Ernie Bilko
(Phil Silvers). He appeared initially
helpful, but years later I realised how
deceptive appearances can be, as he began
even then agitating against me behind the
scenes. Thirty
years later I discovered documentary proof
that he was hand-in-glove with
a
certain secretive
Board
in London, which did not intend me to prosper
as time went on. After Dresden
appeared he began a letter-writing campaign,
both in private and in the Press, attacking
my works. While Aronsfeld developed an
austere antipathy toward me, this Gentile
user of their resources, it was fortunately
not shared by his ladies downstairs in the
library. As years passed, the Library became
less helpful. While I have never hesitated to
assist historians, whatever their religious
background, its current director Dr David
Cesarani refused all access to documents
when we were fighting the Lipstadt legal
action in 2000. I have perhaps unkindly
christened him "Ratface" for his looks.
Even-handedness is not their forte. Es
gibt sotte und sotte, as the Swabians
say; not all folks are
alike.

The three authors state straight away that I
was "comprehensively shredded" by the Lipstadt
Trial -- well that is true, rather as the puny
might aver that the reputation of the German
armed forces was shredded at Stalingrad:
yet they carried on against the weight of the
entire world for two and a half more years,
because they believed the battle against
Judeo-Bolshevism was important to humanity and
worthwhile.

The JC editorial dips deeply into the
pot of Schmiertinte which journalist
Arthur Pottersman first flipped open
against me in April 1963 (and whatever happened
to him?); Roget's thesaurus lying ever-helpful
at their side, the write of me as a self
serving, widely discredited, former convict,
with no reputation, desperate, suffering abject
humiliations, distasteful and cynical, a
historian whose "career has been built upon
shaming the memory of the six million" -- a
sentence which puzzles me, as I have written not
a single book or play or article let alone
produce a Hollywood movie or, like that New York
fraudster, finance a ballet about the
tragedy.

However, the warning letter makes my point.
When the JC contacted Richard Rampton,
Lipstadt's clever trial QC, his response
indicates that he has grasped it: "There is no
question," he claimed, evidently never having
read my books, "that from 1988 onwards he
[David Irving] was a persistent denier."
He would remain so "if he is still denying the
facts about Auschwitz". Now that's an odd
restriction to apply: is Auschwitz the be-all
and end-all of "the Holocaust"? Whatever is
found to have been faked there, nobody must say
it?

The article
continues: "Another member of the defence
team, James Libson [that's him,
behind Lipstadt's right shoulder]
stressed that "Holocaust denial can be to
accept some but to deny other aspects [of
the Shoah]. Irving has a history of
trying to accept aspects in a bid to
rehabilitate himself."

What he is saying to the JC is that
historians now have to buy the whole Holocaust
package, just like Tylenol: that's what capital
letters are for. You are not allowed to open the
box, let alone query one of its contents. If you
do, you are a denier, and in short order after
that self serving, widely discredited, bereft of
reputation, desperate, abject humiliations,
distasteful, yadder, yadder, yadder, and if they
have their way eventually a "former convict,"
too.

Evidently writing history in future is going
to call for some pretty fancy footwork around
the stepping-stones. Libson did most of the
trial legwork (Anthony Julius spoke
literally only one word) during the trial. A
clever but sinister young Jewish lawyer, Libson
told me had had been brought up in a fanatical
Zionist seminary.

JUST don't complicate matters by bringing up
Auschwitz. They wince loudest when I "raise
questions on individual camp artefacts." (Try
telling that to the judge in a murder case:
defence counsel points out that there is no
body, there have been no forensic tests on the
alleged murder weapon, and the site has been
subsequently rigged and faked -- "reconstructed"
is the word the Auschwitz directors prefer).

Himmler, interestingly, commands Korherr to
rewrite his report more concisely for the
Führer, and to change that murky phrase to
read, "channeled through the camps to the
East" instead of "subjected to special
treatment in" them.

Quite an impressive document in the Holocaust
Industry's hands, but for one thing
. . . it makes no mention of
Auschwitz, where, according to them, the biggest
massacre of the lot was going on. The deaths at
Auschwitz were evidently statistically
insignificant at that time. Now that omission
really does bug me as an historian, far more
than what the JC Schmierfinken can write.